Jonathan Goodwin

Bloch and Goldmann

Sun Sep 3, 2006

I’ve personally always found more interesting than Lukacs and Gramsci,
despite Tony Judt’s claim claim
here that they are only of antiquarian interest. Several people I knew
in graduate school were avid readers of The Spirit of Utopia, though I
think I might have been the only person I knew to be interested in
Goldmann’s transformational concepts.

I once suggested that Lem was more–or at least as–deserving of general
acclamations and prizes than Kolakowski, and Judt’s essay has not
exactly changed my mind. Here’s another questionable bit:

The second fantasy is the belief that Marxism has an intellectual and
political future: not merely in spite of communism’s collapse but
because of it. Hitherto found only at the international “periphery”
and in the margins of academia, this renewed faith in Marxism—at least
as an analytical tool if not a political prognostication—is now once
again, largely for want of competition, the common currency of
international protest movements.

The desideratum of world protest is the totaliter aliter, and any
analytic tools employed thereby will have some family resemblance. But
these latter versions–think Empire–embrace contingency far more
readily than Judt allows.